In light of the fact that Donald Trump now has the power to start World War III in just four minutes, we’ve decided to look at what will happen if every nuclear weapon in the world was set off all at once.
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According to a report by the Independent, there are 14,900 nuclear warheads, most of them belonging to either the US (6,800) and Russia (7,000). The UK only has 215, China 260, North Korea 10, and a few other countries with just a couple each.
The largest nuclear explosion in history was the 1961 Soviet Union ‘Tsar Bomba’ which measured 50 megatons – more than 3,800 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. Meanwhile, the US has one of the most powerful bombs called the B83 – a nuclear bomb which generates 1.2 megatons of TNT. With these terrifying facts in mind, if the US and Russia set off all their nuclear weapons and they were all B82s, here is what would happen:
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If all the bombs detonated on the surface and were spaced out across the world, 94 kilometres of land would immediately be obliterated while 232,000 square kilometres of infrastructure would be blown away. A fireball will develop, vaporising anything it touched within a 79,000 kilometre radius and anyone with a 5.8million square kilometre of it would get third degree burns. Great.
The aftermath is even worse. The ionising radiation would contaminate an area 284,000 square kilometres in size, so even if you managed to survive the initial blast, you would develop serious radiation sickness. And finally, if you make it through all of that, then you would have to prepare for a ‘Nuclear Winter’. The black carbon soot produced from the explosions would block solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, plunging the world into darkness, making photosynthesis impossible, and bringing about the collapse of the ecosystem.
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Putting the reality of nuclear warfare into perspective makes you realise how dumb it is that humans created these weapons in the first place. Why would you want to have the potential to bring such destruction to the earth all in the name of anger and greed? Humans are a stupid bunch, aren’t they?
We should all listen to China when they told North Korea to stop dicking about with nuclear weapons. Seriously guys, stop it.
